


Buried Beneath it All

by Companionable



Category: The Yogscast
Genre: Bathing/Washing, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Flux Lalna, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Tactile Affection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-11
Updated: 2014-10-11
Packaged: 2018-02-20 17:30:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2436992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Companionable/pseuds/Companionable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A day of working down in the garden prompts Lalna to lend Kim a hand in washing up, and finds him fixated on old mistakes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Buried Beneath it All

**Author's Note:**

> so i saw images of duncan's minecraft skin w/ fluxy arms and started headcanoning the spreading of his flux, and then i spent like... five minutes in the bathroom scrubbing at my face and just kept thinking "i feel like a whole new person this is amazing face washing is so great"
> 
> and this is the product of those thoughts gettin jiggy in my head. enjoy.

The sun is hot on Nano’s neck as she works on the farm, separated on the southern island, Panda Labs generating a familiar and benign smoke on the horizon behind her. Lalna is tooling away at some machine or another inside, frustrated rumblings echoing down and out the doors sporadically. It’s been a lazy day so far; no nuking to be had, no destruction of any Films Involving Hats, much to her dismay... nary an inkling of anything remotely exciting to keep her interest. And so, it had been to occupy her time that she had gone down to the farm to tidy and replenish their stores. Not that they were necessarily short on any foodstuffs, but it couldn’t hurt to have them around, especially with her flux-exaggerated appetite, and Lalna’s growing one since their destruction of Lalnable’s lab.

Naturally, as soon as she’d gotten down there in the interest of merely harvesting as much wheat as she’d need to craft up a few extra loaves of bread, she’d found an assortment of other tasks that _desperately_ needed attending to, and so she’d settled herself down into the tilled earth and prepared herself for a lengthy stay to organize the crops and get the sprinklers working more efficiently.

She quickly found herself engrossed, trying to work out an arrangement of Witchery crops, Magic Crops, and regular potatoes and carrots to facilitate easy harvesting, as opposed to seeing her running around like a chicken with its head cut off figuring out what went where. The sun had made most of it’s trek across the sky by the time she heard Lalna’s voice from outside the gardens. “How’s it going down here?” he asks, leaning with crossed arms on the fence post, grinning. His labcoat sleeves are rolled up but his gloves are still on, his goggles pushing his bangs back so they fan out in all directions, the sun catching them and lighting them up like a halo. “You haven’t been up at the labs all day, are the plants better company than me?”

Nano snorts, brushes most of the loose dirt from her hands and pushes herself into a standing position. “Lots of things are better company than you, Lalna.”

He pouts hugely, and she laughs. “Well, fine. I was going to offer you some of the iced tea I made earlier, but if my company is that awful, I’ll just drink it all myself, all at once. Fuck you.” He makes a show of turning around and stalking off for the labs, but he’s none too subtle about the glances he keeps casting over his shoulder to make sure she’s following.

The cool air of the Labs is refreshing and breathtaking as she walks through the doors. She hadn't noticed how hot and dehydrated she'd gotten. She frowns at the mess of wires and tools and metal plates cast about to the right of the entrance, evidence of Lalna’s hard work and scattered brain. “Shouldn’t you clean that up before we take a break? I feel like I’m going to electrocute myself if I’m not careful.”

Lalna waves a dismissive hand, heading for the refrigerator and kitchenette to the left. “Don’t worry about it, just leave them. None of the electrical wires are plugged in, there shouldn’t be enough residual energy in them to electrocute you, it’s fine.”

“ _It’s fine_ ,” she mocks, waving her hands around and making them into goggles on her face. “ _I’m Lalna, I’m a scientist, I know these things_ , until I actually hurt myself and then you’re all ignorance and misunderstandings!”

“Your accusations wound me, Nano. I would never do something like that.”

She gestures vaguely in the direction of her right side with both of her arms. “Flux ball?” she says helpfully, and Lalna turns, immediately sheepish as he pours the iced tea out.

“Granted,” he says quietly when he turns back around, handing her a glass. She steps up to him to take it, and he squints at her, a gloved hand falling onto her head. “You were only gardening, how did you get all that dirt on your face?”

“On my face?!” she squeaks. “Is it bad? Is there a lot?” He opens his mouth to answer, and she holds up a hand to silence him. “Wait, I don’t trust your judgement at all, hold on a tick.” Nano makes for the elevators, taking it one level up to the bedroom to look into the mirror hanging above her night stand, placing her glass down and pulling at the skin on her face. She hears the rush of air from the elevator that heralds Lalna following her. “This is ridiculous, I always try to touch my face as little as possible, I try _so hard_ to keep my face clean, and I _always_ end up with a dirty face anyway.”

She turns to face Lalna and sees him holding a gently dripping washcloth in his bare hands, rubber gloves and white labcoat left downstairs. “Here, sit down. It’s all over your neck and ears too.”

Nano makes a face, and he makes a face back at her as he herds her toward the beds. “Lalna. I’m a big girl, I can wash my own face, I do it every morning.”

He shrugs his big shoulders and grins. “Sure you can. I just figured you wouldn’t mind not having to.”

“That is... very true,” she admits, sitting down on the mattress and looking up to him even more than she usually has to. “I am always looking for ways to do less work.”

“Usually at my expense,” he accuses gently, and she makes a noncommittal noise before he presses the cloth to the side of her forehead.

The cloth is soft, damp with warm water, and Lalna drags it carefully down the left side of her face, taking care around the crease of her eye when she squints it shut. Nano wants to speak, wants to joke around to diffuse the weird tension that’s built up in the air, but Lalna’s intensity doesn’t feel like something that should be disturbed. He wipes the cloth back and forth on her cheek, clearly marred by a particularly stubborn smear, then pushes gently at her head to get her to expose her neck so he can wash away the dirt there too.

He takes his time with the left side of Nano’s face, curling his fingers with the washcloth around her ear, which makes her squirm a bit, eliciting a soft apology from Lalna. He runs his thumb -- covered by the cloth -- across her chin, along the soft line of her nose, then down and across the curve of her lips. It’s gentle and deliberate, but when she looks up to catch his eyes, to find whatever it is that’s making him so focused in them, he looks away immediately, turning her head to the left.

As she turns her face, she can see the brief grimace that cuts its way across Lalna’s face, and she casts her eyes away before she can feel guilty. With impossibly more care than he was taking before, Lalna flattens the washcloth against the right side of Nano’s face, the taint swirling around on her skin at his nearness. She screws her eyes tight, trying to will the corruption on her skin into submission so Lalna can continue, so that he can keep treating her with care like this. It’s nice. She doesn’t want it to stop.

His other hand moves from her shoulder to cup the left side of her face, and her eyes fly open from the sudden contact. “It’s okay, Nano. I’m not new to this, I know how it works. Relax.”

It’s hard at first, but as the fibres of the cloth pull against the skin she tends to ignore, she feels the tension slowly working its way out of her, and she lets Lalna work away at whatever dirt he can see, leaning minimally into the hand pressing the cloth against her. It’s the same process as with the other side of her face, slow drags of the cloth, repetitive wiping down her temple, across her cheek and over her jaw to smooth down the curve of her neck. She feels herself drifting, her mind at ease with her body in his hands.

She comes back to herself when the strokes lose some of their care and ease. She’s more than sure that whatever dirt had been on her face is long gone, and it’s gone now beyond making Nano relax into something more serious for Lalna’s emotional state. She glances at him out of the corner of her eye, and sees him with that same grimace, with guilt and desperation playing in his eyes.

Nano reaches up to slowly wrap her hands around his wrist, stilling his hand. “It’s not going to wash off,” she says weakly, trying her hardest to smile at him but finding it difficult to keep it from smearing into the same grim expression as his.

Lalna’s voice is just as thin as hers when he says, “I know.”

She doesn’t let go of his wrist, and eventually feels him lean his forehead to press against hers. She closes her eyes, rubbing her thumbs along the inside of his wrist, both of his hands now cupping her face, the cloth cool on her fluxed cheek. She pulls the hand she holds away from her face, the cloth dropping onto the floor between them, and runs her fingers around his to slot their fingers together. She stops, though, when she opens her eyes and looks down at them properly.

His sudden concern with her flux becomes all too clear. “I know,” Lalna says again, more broken and despairing than before, cut with a weak grin.

The tips of his fingers, at first blush, only look like they’re maybe a little over-chilled, the skin turning purple at the nailbeds. When Nano draws his hand closer to their still connected faces, she can see the veins of the flux straining and swirling outward from the beds of his nails, and the unfluxed skin there is rubbed bright red and raw. Reopened scabs make the purple flux look even more devastating. “Oh, Lalna...” she whispers, looking up from his fingers into his eyes, just above hers.

“I found it a couple days after we blew up the lab,” he admits quietly, still looking at his fingers as he wiggles them around, inspecting. “I took off my gloves and thought maybe I’d caught a hangnail on something. It... it started on one and spread to the others. I kept thinking I might be able to cut it out, or something.” He chuckles, wet and weak, fisting his hand and extending his fingers over and over again. “Apparently it doesn’t work like that. Who knew?”

Reaching out with both hands, Nano slips the fingers of her fluxed hand between his, and cups his face with the other, mirroring his own position. She wants to say something meaningful or important when he looks down into her eyes, his blue eyes still a bit fearful and desperate. She wants something that will not only diffuse his worry but tell him that she’s going to fix it, that they’re going to fix it, somehow. 

Instead, she lifts off the bed just the slightest bit, and kisses him.

It takes a moment for Lalna to respond, but he tucks the hand from her cheek behind her neck, his thumb stroking along her jaw as he kisses her back. It’s slow like that for a moment, just trading breaths between them as they kiss, Nano’s fingers running up and into his long hair, tugging it gently out of it’s standard ponytail. But something about carding her fingers through the blond strands and feeling his hair fall and brush against her face urges her to untangle their fingers and surge up to grip it with both fists. She uses his broad shoulders as leverage, pressing their lips together with more intent.

It’s reactionary, Lalna bending further down over her to kiss her fiercely, but she works with it, pulling him down and against her, leaning back over the bed and letting him support all of their combined weight on his hands. He walks them back, until his body is propped up over hers, kissing her down into the mattress, before he pulls away abruptly, kissing down the right side of her face.

Her skin there is still a bit sensitive, despite how careful Lalna had been with his ministrations, and it sends little shivers down her spine to feel him press his lips there. What fever there had been leeches out of them as he presses each tender kiss to the tendrils of taint he can see. It roils under her skin, unsettled and disturbed. Nano reaches across his back, grasping at him to pull him closer, close enough to keep them together.

Lalna pauses, his lips pressed to the skin of her neck. A hand reaches up to run through her hair, and where his fluxy fingers brush her fluxy skin thrills with the contact, the taint reacting to the nearness of a sister. “I’m so sorry, Nano,” he whispers against her neck, punctuated with kisses that trail up her jaw and back to her mouth.

“S’alright, Lalna,” she mutters into his lips, stroking her hands down his back, “it’s all okay. I promise. It’ll all be okay.”


End file.
